Soldiers with the West Virginia National Guard’s 1st Battalion, 201st Field Artillery Regiment stationed at Camp Buehring in Kuwait are headed home to the U.S.

Officers and soldiers conducted a transfer of authority ceremony at the camp in northwestern Kuwait on July 27.

Here’s a story posted by Sgt. Brian Gordon on the “Granite Thunder” Facebook page:

By Sgt. Brian Gordon, 197th FIB PA

Two formations of soldiers stood at attention in an empty warehouse on Camp Buehring, Kuwait. One was looking forward to the beginning of a mission, the other to the end of one.

 1st Battalion, 201st Field Artillery, West Virginia Army Guard, relinquished command of the Camp Buehring Mayor’s Cell to 1st Battalion, 160th Field Artillery, Oklahoma Army Guard, during a transfer of authority ceremony July 27.

 For the 201st, the event symbolized the completion of its deployment and another chapter in its rich legacy as the Army’s oldest continuously serving unit.

Read the rest of this entry »

I realized yesterday that I never shared the story behind how Camp Buehring in northwestern Kuwait got its name.

It used to be Camp Udairi, until it was renamed in May 2004.

U.S. Army Lt. Col. Charles H. “Chad” Buehring was killed in Baghdad in October 2003 during a rocket-propelled grenade attack on the Al Rasheed Hotel.

Former Deputy U.S. Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying at the same hotel when the attack occurred, but was not injured, according to Stars and Stripes. Wolfowitz later attended Buehring’s funeral at Arlington National Cemetery.

Buehring was a father, husband and a graduate of The Citadel. According to Stars and Stripes, he served in the U.S. Army Special Forces and had been working with Iraqi media in Baghdad to publicize the work of coalition troops.

He is one of the highest ranking officers killed in Iraq.  

A photo of Buehring is hanging in a conference room at the officers’ headquarters at Camp Buehring. That’s where Lt. Col. Clay Coatney briefed us on the 1st/201st’s operations on June 12.

Read our final installment of stories in the Sunday Gazette-Mail. Soldiers with the 1st/201st’s Area Reaction Force maintain a wide presence across northern Kuwait. 

These soldiers tackle everything from shooing away donkeys or camels that get too close to the berm to helping Kuwaiti commandos troubleshoot problems with their Humvees.

While the stories will end, the blog will continue for at least several more days. I’ve neglected it some this week as I’ve been catching up on things in Charleston and I took an extra day off on Tuesday. Slacker.

So I hope you’ll keep reading. I haven’t forgetten that I still have an MRE that I promised to eat. I must admit that I’ve put off  the veggie burger with BBQ sauce for some time now.

In tomorrow’s Gazette, we’ll have a story featuring some soldiers in the West Virginia National Guard who talked about coming home from an extended deployment to Kuwait. We also talked to the soldiers about their future plans for work and school.

I’m back in the newsroom for the first time since late May.

We’ll have three more stories in the Gazette about the work that soldiers tied to the West Virginia National Guard’s 1st/201st Field Artillery Regiment are doing in Kuwait. I’ll also have more in the blog from our trip.

We’re back in West Virginia now, after we took a flight in to Baltimore from Ramstein, Germany, Thursday afternoon.

Tons of people to thank for this opportunity, and I’ve enjoyed the trip and meeting many good people inside the West Virginia National Guard and on the road.

Might take the weekend off, but the blog will be updated quite a bit next week with more stories from our travels. We’ll have several more stories from Kuwait in the Gazette, as well, so keep reading.

Our flight from Germany was cancelled early Thursday morning (the C-5B had an apparent oil leak) and Lt. Col. David Lester tried to find us the best available second or third option.

A young airman who was helping us at the passenger terminal at Ramstein Air Base mentioned a couple flights that could be available, including one that was transporting the bodies of slain servicemen back to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

Dover is synonymous with photos of flag-draped coffins and the “dignified transfer” of military servicemen and women killed in action.

The port mortuary at Dover is the largest mortuary in the DOD and the only one located in the continental United States, according to an Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations website.     

While we’ve been busy on our trip and watched little television, we did see the news about servicemen killed earlier this month in central Iraq and a couple days ago in Baghdad.    

Earlier on Wednesday, a major in the Army was sitting at the passenger terminal at Kuwait International Airport. The major told WCHS-TV reporter Kennie Bass how he had recently learned that his brother was killed in Afghanistan.

I thought it might be cool to take a shot of this Kuwaiti dinar I had left over, because I might not get a chance to ever spend it.

The dinar is valuable. Earlier this week, one dinar was worth almost $3.66.

It cost me three dinars to buy a work visa, which lasts through Sept. 13, so you never know. Maybe I will get back.

In Germany, we paid for food, train fare and other goods with the euro. The exception was at Ramstein Air Base, an American military base where businesses welcome the dollar.

Last week, one dollar was worth .67, or roughly two-thirds of one euro. Below is a photo of the flipside of a dinar.

Just outside the airstrip at Kuwait International, I had a chance encounter Wednesday with Gary Shirk, 21, a Moorefield resident who’s active Air Force.

He noticed the West Virginia T-shirt I was wearing and approached me shortly before our bird (a more modern C-5B this time) left Kuwait.

Turns out Shirk went to high school with my cousin, Danielle Yokum, and he also knows her father, Jody Yokum, who is my first cousin and lives in Seneca Rocks.

Shirk expects to be in Kuwait for the next four months, and he’ll have a birthday in the next few days. He has a wife, Monica.

Also turns out that I have a high school classmate, Jasmine Rutherford, serving with the 1^st/201^st at Camp Buehring in Kuwait. We both graduated from Fairmont Senior High School in 1997, and we’ve talked a little bit on Facebook since I left.

Unfortunately for me (but good for her) I missed Jasmine because she was on R&R leave by the time we reached Kuwait.

We’re back from Kuwait, and we’re trying to fly out of Germany today. Sorry for the delay in posts. Internet access is shaky at best.